It's been a wonderful weekend in Hokitika celebrating a 100 years of flying in Westland. Great presentations last night at the Regent Theatre and on the bus tour today...
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| Dr Teichelmann's house... a beloved doctor in town and who paid for the Captain Buckley's Avro 504K to be railed to Hokitika for the 1924 Empire Exhibition. He was also a great mountain climber, photographer and an investor in early West Coast flying efforts |
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| The Avro 504K on the Hokitika beach in 1924 |
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| Some of the memorials at the site of the old Southside airfield |
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| The Fox Moth replica which used to be in a special building at the airport terminal is now in the adjacent Industrial Park... A much better display and people can have a really good wander about the replica |
I have stayed at Teichelmann's B&B on a couple of occasions when I have been in Hokitika, in the garden cottage. The owner of the B&B still has a lot of Dr Ebenezer Teichelmann's clothing hanging in a closet. Apart from supporting early aviation activities, Dr Teichelmann is mostly known for being a member of climbing parties which were the first to knock-off a large number of peaks along the main divide of the Southern Alps in the vicinity of Franz Josef Glacier and Fox Glacier. And Dr Teichelmann used to carry a big, heavy, plate-glass-negative camera to the top of those mountains to capture wonderful images of the surrounding terrain. I've got a copy of the book “Ebenezer Teichelmann — pioneer New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, surgeon photographer and conservationist: Cutting Across Continents” by Bob McKerrow, published in 2005.
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